"Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
-- George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

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Saturday, September 10, 2016

Curbing Their Enthusiasm

Hillary Clinton expressed "regret" Saturday for comments in which she said "half" of Donald Trump's supporters are "deplorables," meaning people who are racist, sexist, homophobic or xenophobic.

"Last night I was 'grossly generalistic,' and that's never a good idea. I regret saying 'half' -- that was wrong," Clinton said in a statement in which she also vowed to call out "bigotry" in Trump's campaign.

Jesus Fucking Christ. What has been Drumpf's defining characteristic, not just during his scampaign, but his entire adult life? Never admit error, never give an inch, no matter how small or stupid or inconsequential, or blatantly obvious a lie it is. If anything, double down. His retard flock have no idea what he stands for -- even Drumpf has no idea what he stands for, as that changes day to day, sentence to sentence but they love him for that. They will follow him over a cliff, while he tells them it's not a cliff.
Anyone who's ever been successful in sales and/or marketing knows intrinsically (whether they've phrased it as such or not) one essential truth of psychology: the quickest, most effective way to get someone on your side, to get them to do what you want, is to understand how they perceive themselves. This is the key, the proverbial Rosetta Stone, to persuading and motivating people. This is not rocket science, people; it's not complicated at all. It's just the most basic premises of marketing:

Who is my audience (market)?

What is my unique selling proposition (commonly referred to as a USP by your internets webinar types)? What do I and my product offer that other, similar products competing for the same consumers do not offer?

HFC is flailing because she, like most establishment Democrats and liberals, fall for their self-deluded nonsense that when they win, they do so because "our ideas are better" or some such nonsense. Folks, that is a filthy goddamned lie, and anyone who tells you different is not your friend. Buh-lieve me. Only people who follow politics closely, and read a variety of content and sources regularly, vote on ideas and policies. That's a fraction of the electorate. What do you think the rest of them base their votes on? Refresh my memory, who was it that said that people would rather be strong and wrong than weak and right?

Let's tease this out with the two examples before us. What sort of individual characterizes the average Drumpf voter? Aggrieved, hostile, almost deliberately uninformed, ripe for the picking. They're just waiting for someone to come along and tell them that their incoherent ranting jibes somehow with reality, and that they can Make It All Better. Perhaps the funniest thing about that whole dynamic is that these are people who did not come from any real means in the first place; they have been festering in their failed shitholes for generations.

They are the people Joe Bageant lionizes and empathizes with in Deer Hunting with Jesus (which I am currently re-reading, and not really getting any new insights as of yet, but we'll see). If there's one thing conservative asshole Kevin Williamson has been right about, it's that the typical flyover-country Drumpf voter is an aggrieved loser who thinks someone else is responsible for him and his family and community all failing at the business of life. I dunno what to tell these people except maybe they should have stayed in school and off the oxy.

So that's the heart of the Drumpf market, and his USP is that he'll "fix" everything, though after fifteen months of insult-comedy jabber, he has yet to explain exactly how. But he understands that facts and logic are entirely unimportant to them; their logic is that of the riot mob, the idiot crowd flipping cars and setting fires in the street when their city's sports team wins the championship game. In other words, morons. That's not schtick, that's who these people are. All they have in this life is clogging arteries and the anger they've been conditioned to, like hamsters in a Skinner box, tapping the pad for the daily outrage pellet.

Now, who comprises HFC's market, how do they perceive themselves, and what is her USP? This is where HFC and the Democrats continue to falter and misidentify who their core audience is. They seem to think their audience is something along the lines of "people who want social and economic justice," by which they arrive at their natural, predictable USP: better ideas and policies.

In a rational world, that would and should be enough. Feel free to let us all know when that world comes along. In the meantime, at this stage of the game, the nominee's role is to motivate turnout. And despite month after month of coverage touting HFC's massive "ground game" advantage, and a much larger war chest, and much more aggressive spending on advertising, the poll averages are within the margin of error, and registration in key swing states is way down for Dems, and way up for Donald Fucking Gump.

So is it the messenger or the message? It's a combination of both, but at this point you can only change one of those elements. The season is too far along, and the electorate far too polarized, for either candidate to do much in the way of convincing people to come to the other side. The closest either of them can do there is to convince fence-sitters and self-styled "independents" (in other words, ignorant schmucks who take pride in sniffing their own "pox on both their houses" purity farts) to get off the fence and not throw their protest vote at Gary Johnson or Jill Stein.

So that leaves motivating their bases as a marketing strategy, and that's where that stupid apology comes in. See, HFC's USP now is keeping an incompetent madman from assuming the reins of power. Pointing out that the equally incompetent thinkers who support a candidate who is a proven conspiracy theorist and borderline racist must, by association, support those things as well, is entirely fair game, especially given the lies he routinely spouts about everything and everyone. If anything, she should have simply repeated what she said, but with tighter language than this purple "basket of deplorables" nonsense.

Instead of the usual abject, lawyerly apology, which will do nothing but further demoralize her own base, and give the media dipshits another toy to chew on, she should have made a full statement, something like this:

We are all Americans, and can and should support candidates that we trust and believe in. And that is precisely why I have questions and concerns about the supporters of Fuckface Von Clownstick, why they would trust and believe in someone with his verifiably toxic personal and professional history.

I understand why they are angry, and I promise to work hard to help their families and communities, regardless of whom they support or vote for. That said, they should be reminded that they are supporting a candidate who propagates birther conspiracies, who insults military veterans and uses them as props, who openly admires an oligarchic despot that has decimated his country's economy and menaces its neighbors.

Your candidate has run on a false reputation of being a business tycoon, when in fact he has a decades-long track record of failures and incompetence. This reputation seems to come from his reality show. Spoiler alert: the couples on The Bachelorette don't really get or stay married. Chrisley, whoever and whatever that is, doesn't really know best.

Your candidate has licensed his name countless times to the worst sorts of con artists and scammers, making brief videos promising his endorsement, but caring only about whether the check cashes, and not if customers get fleeced out of their life savings. You know he's currently being sued for fraud, right?

Every one of his four bankruptcies has lined his own pockets with money taken from workers, contractors, small businesses, shareholders, and banks. No American bank will lend him money for anything, because of that history of dishonesty. You can find plenty of information about these things and more with less than a minute of googling, and maybe fifteen minutes of reading. The fact of the matter is, he is not really a genius businessman, and he never has been. He just played one on teevee. He's not qualified to run your local supermarket, much less the United States.

Your candidate has run on immigration policy as a centerpiece, yet he routinely hires immigrants to build and work in his American properties. His own wife arrived and stayed in this country on a timeline that is cloudy at best; he promised to clarify that narrative and has failed to do so. Yet he wants to throw out everyone else with a cloudy narrative, breaking up families and communities, businesses and lives. He brags about his signature product lines, which are all made in many exotic locations, from China to Bangladesh to Turkey to Brazil. Anywhere but here, in the America he promises to make great again. He keeps promising to bring your jobs back. Maybe someone should ask him if they can make his ties or his furniture here in one of the closed factories in their towns.

The fact of the matter is that there are pockets of racism and white supremacism in various parts of this great country of ours. I'm not going to speculate as to why, but I know they're out there and so do all of you. I would encourage you to inform yourselves about some of these groups and their ideology of hate, just to see what we're all up against. I will guarantee that you will find that all of these groups -- every single one of them, without exception -- if they support one of us, it will be your candidate that they support. Every time. This is not a coincidence; this is a direct, entirely predictable outcome of his consistently divisive, abusive rhetoric.

This does not mean that you or everyone who supports your candidate is a racist or a hateful bigot. But it does mean that, given your support of him, it is your responsibility to inform yourself of this dynamic, determine why it might be that such hateful people would be so consistent in their support of this man, and decide for yourselves if that's the sort of political association you want to have.

Voting is a right, but it is also a privilege that comes with responsibilities. And if we fail to do those things with thought and attention, the process itself is doomed to fail.

She came close to this with her "alt-right" speech, but again has failed to make the connection with her own base. It's time to motivate, and at this point, against this dumb animal, the thing that motivates best is the promise of scorched fucking earth. Drumpf, his family, his businesses, his associates, everything he stands for, and everyone who has supported him in this vicious, paranoid style, needs to be curb-stomped. A twenty-point blowout is not enough.

The first step is to stop apologizing, especially when you were correct in the first place. That "better person" shit won't get you squat. Hang that albatross around their worthless necks and walk away.

[Update 9/10/16, 8:45 PM PDT: As if to confirm what I said above, please refer to Ta-Nehisi Coates (for affirmation of the above points) and Ron Fournier (for, uh, reverse affirmation). Fournier finds it hard to believe that literally half of Drumpf's supporters could be the toxic dickheads Clinton decries, when the fact is that two-thirds of them think Obama's a sekrit moooslim, and plenty are also birthers, just like their daddy. And it just goes downhill from there. HFC is right, both is scale and degree. There's a lot of these fools, and they're off their fuckin' meds. Quit making false equivalences. Fuck these people in the neck with an aluminum baseball bat.]